The Great Migration Research Paper

Before WWI, most black people had been dehumanized, effectively stripping them of the feeling to vote and were bereft from protection from police. “I am in the darkness of the south and I am trying my best to get out,” an inspirational migrant from Alabama wrote to the Chicago Defender. New opportunities for the urban part of the North blos-somed when the war reared its ugly head. The American industrial economy grew vigorously, and as existing European immigrants and white women were unable to meet demand, northern businesses leaned to black southerners to fill their place. When the word of higher wages and ameliorated working conditions spread around, northern businesses were met with positive feed-back as black men, in significant numbers came flocking, thus sprouting a social movement out of urban misery. The War, unknowingly, set the par for work for African Americans and the North became a liberating meadow for all those who sought equality and wanted to avoid the ‘racist menace’.

In Chapter 4 of his book, which is aptly titled “Postwar Passions”, Daniels chooses to focus on the experiences of African-Americans in the post-WWI era, specifically focusing on race riots that occurred during the “Red Summer” of 1919. (104) There is a long-standing history of racial discord between whites and African-Americans, but the post-WWI years are a unique time. It has been more than fifty years since slavery has been abolished, but it will still take another forty plus years before discrimination on the basis of race is made illegal in America. Industrialization after the turn of the century and blatant racism in the South led to the migration of millions of African-Americans to northern

Similar to The Great Migration, The Second Great Migration was the movement of more than five million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West from 1941 to 1970. Between 1930 and 1950, the number of Southern tenant farmers was cut roughly in half, while the number of tractors tripled from 1940 to 1950 (“Second Great Migration: Historical Overview”). Adding to the troubles, many planters started to use the mechanized cotton picker. The need for laborers at harvest time was therefore drastically decreased. Besides a terrible economic situation, Southerners, as they had done during the Great Migration, were also fleeing Jim Crow. Also, with little hope of glow in the justice system, African Americans were at the crime of abusive employers, landlords, and almost anyone bent on depriving them of their rights (“Second Great Migration”). Once World War II came about and the United States became engaged in a two-front war against Japan and Germany, production shifted into higher gear. In addition to the usual needs for armaments, clothing, food, and training facilities, the naval war with Japan stimulated increased shipbuilding and the making of naval material, much of it directed to and through Pacific coast ports.

A number of states experienced decades of Black population decline, especially across the deep South known as the “Black Belt” where cotton had been king identifier. In 1920 however a large percentage of the African American population was concentrated in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. By 1910 African Americans constituted more that half the population of South Carolina and Mississippi and more than 40 percent in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana by 1970. Mississippi was the only state that maintained an African American representation above 30 percent. Today, the effects of the Great Migration can be seen in the Music we hear, the food we eat, and even the look and feel of cities throughout the

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York, NY: Random House, 2010.

The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination… the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land (qtd. in W.T.L. 235).

From the early 1900s – 1920s the Great Black Migration occurred. In addition, the Great Migration occurred in the early 1900s and ended shortly after the Great War. The Great Black Migration was a time where blacks left the south to seek a better lifestyle in the Midwestern, Northern, and Eastern states. Blacks fled the South to seek better jobs, escape racism and discrimination, and to look for better schooling for their children. The Great Black Migration mostly occurred in the states of Illinois, Missouri, New York, and California. During the Great Migration, more than 100,000 blacks migrated to Harlem, New York. In Chicago and New York City, blacks were empowered by black-owned businesses, newspapers, and communities. Newspaper

During this period, exogenous changes led to migration restrictions. World War I can be looked at as the cause to this shift. The economic struggles citizens faced strengthened American nationalism while it simultaneously unwelcomed migration. The war pushed these anti­immigration views because America did not want any dangerous individuals to enter the country during a time of conflict. During this time, immigration coalitions were broken up which allowed for African Americans in the United States to serve as an alternative form of labor rather than foreign migrants (Lecture 15, 2/18/16).

Housing and racial discrimination of the 1950's and 1960's can not start without the discussion of the great migration of African Americans. African Americans left the south and moved to the north to large cities like Portland, Detroit, Seattle and topic at hand Chicago. In search of new lives and to avoid tough segregation laws blacks flooded the Chicago area. According to online reports more than 6 million African Americans moved up north from 1916 to 1970. The mistreatment of the southerners and segregation alone was a huge incentive for African Americans to leave the south.

Additionally, these wars, the great depression, and the Dust Bowls set motion for what is now known as the Great Migration. The Great Migration was a war spurred movement of African Americans migrating from the rural South to the North. This resulted in a total of 700,000 African Americans resettling in the North (Foner). In the commencement of the memoir Angelou and her brother Bailey are transported to Stamps Arkansas : “ … we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas”(4). Presently after the great depression Angelou and her brother migrate back North once again to visit their mother in San Francisco. Little did they know that they were one of the 700,000 African Americans partaking

After the post-Civil War Reconstruction period ended in 1876, white supremacy was largely restored across the South.Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what blacks could expect to make working the land in the rural South it was pretty hard for them to live.By the end of 1919, some 1 million blacks had left the South, usually traveling by train, boat or bus; a smaller number had automobiles or even horse-drawn carts they couldn’t take it any more so they decided to leave.many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War. Migrants were forced to deal with poor working conditions and competition

Evidence of this general consensus is in abundance in the publicly published writings of Southern blacks, from the barely literate to scholarly intellectuals, presented in Document 1. In 1919 the Journal of Negro History published letters from Southern Negroes to the Chicago Defender, written in the early years of the Great Migration, inquiring about employment prospects in the North. One 1917 letter from Florida mentions “a rumour about the great work going on in the north,” the only inclusion of what might have been interpreted as the work of

Western migration increased a lot in the late nineteenth century. “Many of the first American migrants had come to the West in search of quick profits during the mid-century gold and silver rushes.” (II. Post-Civil War Westward Migration) Most Americans first started to move westward because of the gold rush. “It was land, ultimately, that drew the most migrants to the West. Family farms were the backbone of the agricultural economy that expanded in the West after the Civil War.” (II. Post-Civil War Westward Migration) Land also drew most americans to the west. The homestead act was the main reason migration increased. The Home stead act allowed settlers to claim federally owned lands in the West. They just had to head to the west pick a plot of land, file a claim, and begin “improving” the land.

During this time in a movement known as the Great Migration, thousands of African-Americans also known as Negros left their homes in the South and moved North toward the beach line of big cities in search of employment and a new beginning. As Locke stated, “the wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger

In The Southern Diaspora, James Gregory highlights the migration of people from the southern states to the northern states. He also pinpoints their accommodations to the new environment. He provides the reader with a better understanding of what effects did the migration have on the people. He goes on to compare the migrations of blacks and whites before they came together. His explains, in his first few chapters, the information that describes the great migrations. For example, he breaks down Southern Diaspora. He mentions that the term indicates the population movement out of the South, which is an appropriate term for the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on racism, Gregory focuses on achievements, unity, and problems for both blacks